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Hello everyone,

I am looking for some advice from fine arts librarians.

Here's my story: I was on a very nice career path, having spent 8 years as fine arts reference & instruction librarian at two art & design schools.

Now we have moved across the country for better weather (hooray!) and a great tenure-track job for my partner.

The down side is that we moved to a much smaller city, where the opportunities for fine arts librarians are scarce (and the people who hold those few positions will not be ready for retirement anytime soon).

I am currently working as a programming librarian at a public library. It involves a lot of PR work and very little time on the reference desk, so it is not a great fit for me.

A position has just opened up for a visual resources assistant at a university's visual resource center. It is not a professional librarian job. The primary duties would be to maintain the MDID and ARTstor collections for the fine arts and art history faculty's use. The visual resource center is not a part of the university's library, but is located in the art & design building.

My question is:
Keeping in mind that (fingers crossed) a fine arts reference job may someday open up here, or that we may move to another city with more job prospects —
Which would put me in a better position to get a job as a fine arts librarian in the future: The professional librarian job at the public library (programming librarian), or the non-professional job running the visual resource center for the department of art & design at a university?

Thanks for any insights!

[ranganathan]

Caveat: I'm a public services librarian at a university, not a fine arts librarian.

But having been on numerous search committees, I will go ahead and advise you to consider moving to the paraprofessional position.  Unfair or not, many academic libraries shy away from public librarians in job pools. If you take the paraprofessional job and make a consistent effort to be professionally involved with the proper librarian organizations (proper meaning whatever is right for fine arts- I'm not sure), you will be in good shape to argue in your cover letter that you were doing your best to stay in the field while waiting for a professional position to become available.